Sneak Peek: 2018 SAP Community Redesign

Following the recent announcements about operational changes happening behind the scenes with the Community, I’m excited to share a preview of the site redesign coming later this year. The Community team, in collaboration with our developer and user experience colleagues, has been working on this redesign to address major issues that have contributed to the broken site experience we have today.

This redesign is the culmination of months of work: processing member feedback, building requirements, multiple rounds of revisions, prototyping, and usability testing to ensure that we are putting our best foot forward.

View this brief video to get a first glimpse of the new design:

At 2017 SAP TechEd events in both Las Vegas and Barcelona, Oliver Kohl and I presented a prototype of the redesigned site. While the new UI was not fully functional yet, the prototype allowed us to demonstrate the four core experiential changes that users can expect:

Simplified content structure

Easier content discovery

Personalized experience

Better community feel

One of the major challenges that the current site faces is a very flat, wide content structure. With over 4,000 tags on the community, our members have struggled to find the right place to put their content, which, of course makes finding the content nearly impossible.

Not only have we been working on significantly reducing and consolidating tags (See Oliver’s post on the subject), but the new design is built around a much more logical content structure that is ten times smaller than our original tag structure, with the remaining tags rolled up into higher level topics. This change will help you to create a better mental model of where you are in the site at any given time. It will also make it easier to find and create content, and give you a more centralized place to gather with other members who share your interests and follow the same topics as you.

In this new structure, each topic will have its own dedicated topic page. The topic page will have smart content feed with search, filter, and sort capabilities that will help you stay up to date with the activity in that topic area. In addition, you’ll find a list of topic moderators, related resources, featured content, and other related topics that you might be interested in. You’ll also get a quick, at-a-glance view of how many other members are following that topic. Think of this solution as the “spaces” of the future, including all the benefits of gathering together in one place, combined with the ability to cross-tag content to appear in multiple relevant topics.

Users will more easily find other community members who share their interests, due to not only the simplified site structure but also because of our new browse and search community tools. Users who have not yet logged in will immediately see these discovery tools, front and center on the page. Click one of the seven main topic category icons to begin exploring the available topic pages. From there, you can either browse the entire list or begin typing into the search field to reduce the results until you find what you are looking for. On the anonymous homepage, you’ll also find recommended topics and content, Community news, featured content, and more.

Remember, at this point, you’re not even logged in yet! Once you log into the new site, you’ll notice a major difference in how you interact with the Community. You will now have one personalized homepage, tailored to show you the content and activity that is relevant to you and the topics and people you’ve followed.

The first thing you’ll notice is a quick view of your profile information, welcoming you to your own special page. Your new activity and notifications streams will be the centerpiece of this page, with new filtering and sorting capabilities and better content grouping to help you get the most value from these tools. You’ll also see links to the topic pages and people whom you’ve followed, as well as suggestions for other topics and people to follow. Plus, you’ll get all the same great features as the anonymous homepage, including trending content and recent activity, Community news, and featured content.

I want to highlight a few additional features that will appear on every Community page:

Persistent, complete breadcrumbs to make it easier to navigate throughout the site

Easy access to common tasks, such as Write a Blog Post and Ask a Question

One-click access to the new Browse All Topics tool

This is just a taste of the major changes you’ll see in the new site redesign. I know your first question is: “when will this be available?” We haven’t announced a launch date yet, but you can expect to see more details, resources, and communications coming soon to help you prepare and get excited about this change.

Great news! really looking forwared to this.
Agree with Denis – need to make better use of space and less paging. [for example the Oracle & MS community pages use every bit of space on these pages]
Less marketing, more technical content.
Pls make sure the moderators list and kep upto date.

Thanks for the thoughts, Shiva. We’re hoping to also improve the topic page editor process to help our topic experts keep the information on their pages current. Will share more details as I have them.

Being able to adapt to a changing environment – I like it. Oliver – I as many people could send you a long list. At this point – I don’t think I want to. Once the changes are made I’m sure it will take things off of my list and add more.

Fair question. One of the major benefits of moving off of Jive and towards the tag-based structure was the ability to cross-share information that was genuinely relevant to multiple topics. Another benefit was greater flexibility in custom development, though no one here will argue that our takeoff has not been…bumpy, at best.

I think a mistake we made in moving off of Jive was to not take the “this worked well” lessons, in addition to the “let’s not do that” lessons. Had we done that, we would not have lost so much of that sense of community and connection that each member had with other members in their interest areas. This new design really reflects that learning — we know there were good parts about “spaces” and we’re trying to bring back the positives while doing a better job of taking advantage of the benefits of having our own platform.

I do see some examples in ABAP where the question crosses to the functional area and is tagged with both ABAP and SD or MM, for example.It can be helpful but such cases are rather rare.

On the flip side, I bet that for one question where this is used correctly and has any value there must be 100 questions that are tagged incorrectly with multiple tags. Also multiple tags can cause confusion.

For example, I’m looking at the list of questions in ABAP tag. But some questions might have been cross-posted from Web Dynpro or Fiori or Adobe Forms. And imagine the question is rather vague, e.g. about a “field” behavior. Because you’ve opened it through ABAP tag your first thought is, of course, it’s a general ABAP question. Then OP gets offended because it was not. (Secondary tags are barely visible as it is and they’re only on top, so if I scroll down a page to the Answer window i’m not seeing the tags.)

Ugh, how did I get sucked into yet another tag discussion? Curse you, Denis! 🙂

Perhaps a lesser known fact – we had tags before with Jive 🙂 Benefit with the spaces was that you basically got the primary tag for FREE. We also had a tag cloud for easier hunting/navigation/searching.

I am thrilled to see that SAP has heed our call to correct the wrongs that happened when the NEW SCN was launched: the tight community we were, was scatered and lost. SCN was our space to collaborate, a source of knowledge for all consultants, one of the best software communities I had experienced so far!

I do have a doubt regarding the Google Customized Search engine: how will the SAP SCN Google Customized Search engine be affected by this new redesign to the NEW SCN (http://bit.ly/new-scn-search)? Consider that many users access the topics in the SCN from this place instead of the SCN itself.

We haven’t rolled out gamification in the new site yet, as we (and our reputation advisory user group) felt that it was not the appropriate time, given the other issues in the site. Look for more info soon on plans for gamification!

If the correct answers count is only going to be displayed in the profile page then we would also get the idea of how many karma points one has anyway. In the current snapshot 12 correct answers means 120 points.

If this is the display profile page with correct answer count then why not display the total karma points.

The reputation system that awards Karma credits is native to the Q&A platform (AnswerHub). That part of the reason we don’t display it publicly – it’s not representative since it doesn’t include blog contributions.

The other reason it is a member/mod-only view, is to de-emphasize points. The point system created other negative side effects on the community we are trying to avoid by calculating reputation and expertise scores instead. The scores will consider both Q&A and Blog contributions, as well as the ratio of activity to quality.

A Quick query: When you mention ‘contribution’ ; how do you plan to segregate Quality vs Quantity debate? In some forums, the blogs are being published with comical content however the Karma credits gets increased for every such blog publish.

Can we have a system where the participants can rate the blogs and this factor influence the Karma credits or whatever reward system out there?

Sorry, but down votes on answers are very rare in the current Community and will have minimal effect. Answers up votes and comments “likes” will result in point cheating like in Jive and will be disabled at some moment.

“Like” on the blog post is fine (like in the old days).

In general I see no differences with Jive point system – only “helpful” answer was removed 🙁

Hi Vadim, Thank you for your input, we are also very concerned about cheating.

The algorithms will look at a combination of factors, these are two examples only.

I’m sure you remember that on Jive points were awarded for content creation for blogs and documents, regardless of the quality indicators that followed from the community. The algorithm for the score considers both so we think it will be a better representation of overall quality, not just quantity of contributions.

It’s hard to talk about the score and algorithm in the abstract, but I know we are working towards the same goal – to keep quality on the community high and foster a healthy exchange between experts. We all want to encourage quality over activity, recognize trusted experts, and discourage and contend with cheaters.

We designed the scoring engine knowing the algorithm will have to evolve based on what we saw when it started calculating and any side effects it might cause when displayed. I trust you and others will continue to provide feedback that helps us make the scores representative of the behaviors we value.

But the algorithm has to be simple enough to check it using manual calculation. If the algorithm is not clear or it’s not possible to calculate manually the same then the result will be useless to my mind!

In Jive at least we had rating for blogs, in the new platform there is no option for a member to indicate in a quantifiable way the perceived quality of a blog, so I am rather skeptical that the scoring algorithm will consider blog quality (unless the team finally introduces some form of rating) – the number of views, likes and comments does not indicate content quality.

Hi Veselina, Let’s see when we have a prototype to look at together. While we can’t share the full algorithm, there is more to it than that. We’ll give a preview and solicit feedback from our advisory groups, and fine-tune as needed, before anything is made public.

SCN is not “some forums”. We now have the SCN blogging guidelines, so any blogs that do not follow them need to be simply reported to the moderators. Of course, we can (and should) use humor when writing about the SAP subjects. But if anyone starts posting random joke of the day type of content outside of Coffee Corner (which is Karma-free) – that goes to the moderators.

Is the “current snapshot” you refer to the logged in home page? It shows the number of accepted answers as well as the karma credit total. Steffi is right that the total sums the karma credits for accepted answers as well as those awarded for other quality indicators.

We have plans to release the karma credit logs to members, so they can see all the activities that make the karma credit total go up and down. Currently, that view is only available to moderators.

Can I also suggest as a Content expert the need to sort Ascend/Descend for psot that have been answered?

And get rid of Answer and Comment, just a reply, currently Comments can be added anywhere and on long posts it’s impossible to find the updated comment and they are not in order so not always clear what it may be referring to.

And how do I sign up for beta testing so I can suggest enhancements as well?

We are expecting to be able to filter by answered/unanswered in the new view. We also expect to have sorting within results. I assume you are referring to a sort by date. If no, please elaborate.

Answers & comments: this is a common request and one we’re working with our UX team to solve. We will not see this removed in the first iteration, though, as it’s fundamental to the platform (AnswerHub) and will require more work and time. I do understand that the UX team has taken steps in the new design to help reduce confusion about these two functions, while not eliminating the dual response feature altogether. This was validated in the usability testing, so we’ll have to see what you think about the new approach in v1.

Beta testing: we are finalizing the details of the beta period and will share with the wider community as soon as that is firmed up. Keep an eye out for more updates!

Sorry, but it was already told so many times that answer/comment feature is NOT working for SAP community. You can do whatever possible but it’s not working and will never work!

If it’s not possible to remove answer/comment difference with AnswerHub (fundamental to the platform) then it’s better to stop other activities/improvements and start preparation to platform change. If not then all other improvements will be waste of time and will be redesigned on the new platform!

Just to be clear on one part of your point: “If it’s not possible to remove answer/comment difference with AnswerHub (fundamental to the platform) … “.

It is quite possible to have only one response type or none at all (verified at the source).

It could be Answers (Perhaps relabeled as Replies and preferred for Questions), Comments (as is the case with Coffee Corner), Answers & Comments (as we unfortunately have right now) or none at all (which could be used for Announcements) Similar to what we had in Jive for localized announcements (Discussions unmarked as Questions were considered to be Announcements). That last item would be rather helpful in getting rid of invalid blogs used for that purpose.

Calling Answer by the label “Reply” and removing Comment from a Question allows a chronological sequence of replies instead of the jumping around from thread to thread within a single Question, This allows you to still assign Accepted Answer to any of the posts to a question. Not only that, it also makes it much easier to see the latest posts to a Question since they are by definition sequential by timestamp.

Jive did not allow you to post Replies to Replies, which incidentally creates multi-threaded subsets to the Question and you are back to not being able to easily see the latest posts. We used to use @Mentions in Jive to make sure the Reply posted targetted the correct post and/or text segments copied and pasted.

From my perspective the only good place for Comments is in the Coffee Corner where there are no Right Answers to be selected.

The None at All (neither Answer or Comment) can be used with a presently unused third type of post available from AH. I have proposed using a third type of AH posting solely for announcements and make it completely invalid to post blogs as Announcements any longer.

Hope all this was clearly understood. If not, perhaps we can have a call. I am also quite happy to set up a call with DZone (parent company of AH).

To my mind without hierarchy of replies we are coming back to 90x with only chronological forums. Chronological sequence can be an option (like in Jive) but hierarchy view is also valuable. In case of multiple answers only reply on reply will keep the logical structure of discussion:

Q: How to …

..R: Use option A

….R: What else?

……R: And configure C

..R: Use option B

….R: This option is not available in my system

“Jive did not allow you to post Replies to Replies” – ??? May be allowed?

I guess I never used that option. Was that available in Track in Communications or only in Discussions? I only used TiC for keeping up with monitoring content and it was, to the best of my memory, and it has been a long time now, always sequential in chronological order.

In the left window of communications you had just 1 entry per question with a number telling you how many replies have been made since you look at it the last time.

Im certain that in the detail of the question you had the alternative between threaded and flat view. I can’t remember if that was also valid for the right window in the communications stream, probably yes, I had my setting to flat since I did not like to read Japanese style from top to bottom with 1 character in a column.

As this happened with longer discussions, as a moderator you can see a screenshot in this old discussion: https://jam4.sapjam.com/wiki/show/4w0qzrTpVcUP1RYLLpwRvn

That’s the part I liked about the old Jive platform – you could actually customize the view and choose either hierarchy or flat structure. It’s surprising how little this platform offers in terms of customizing to the user preferences. One would think this would be all the rage these days…

Sorry Jamie Cantrell , but I don’t recall any portion of the prototype testing which validated having two response types. In fact I remember being told that they were really not going address most of the complaints about format of Questions/Discussions, Activities or Notifications.

Can you back up your statement? Or show us how you came to this conclusion? And not just show us that the UX & Strategy decided to come to that conclusion.

Thanks for participating in this thread. As one of the people who participated in the testing, it’s important to have your perspective. This item was one of the readouts specific to this subject (answers/replies) from the usability testing, which took into account experiences and feedback from a variety of types of community users (expert, casual, etc.), rather than something I or anyone from UX is pulling out of a hat. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we’ll get in v1 to reduce confusion around the answers/comments issue is the right or best option — simply that this is v1 of the total redesign and I’ve acknowledged that it won’t be replaced in this version. Does it mean it won’t be replaced? No, not necessarily. But it’s not being replaced in this first version.

I do not recall being asked specifically what I think about comments vs answers as well (although I think that I mentioned during the session that the lack of redesign of question detail is disappointing).

If the topic was discussed only with a specific group of users who participated in testing then the result is not representative. If the question was asked only to a subset of the participants it will be interesting also to analyze how the people who provided feedback use the Q&A part of the site. As a consultant I have encountered more than once the situation where the business realizes that a requested feature is a terrible idea only when they try using it in real scenarios. 🙂

Looks really good, would agree with some others and say seems there is still too much going on and could be stripped back to bare bones. I think for ‘Browse Topics’, the ‘All Topics’ section should clearly be displayed as a consolidation of the other six icons, if that’s what it is. I think when you look at websites like stack overflow and even craiglist which have really simple almost dull interfaces but were never innovated because simple to use and serve a singular purpose which is what community needs to be again in my opinion.